


All That Could Have Been

by gelbes_gilatier



Series: "Come in," she said, "I'll give you shelter from the storm" [1]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Angst, Canon Het Relationship, Divorce, F/M, Introspection, Paperwork, Regret
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-29
Updated: 2014-01-29
Packaged: 2018-01-10 10:27:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1158553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gelbes_gilatier/pseuds/gelbes_gilatier
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lyla and John and divorce papers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All That Could Have Been

**Author's Note:**

> Oops. 'Nother John/Lyla fic, this time taking place pre-series. This is all _My Best Friend's Wedding_ 's fault, or at least that of the soundtrack and it also happened because I'll Be Okay and I have a kind of complicated history and it somehow begged to be written. Also, Presentation of Doom looming on the horizon, so naturally, I'm writing like a berserk and maybe, if everything goes better than expected _or_ things really go down the drain (just covering all my bases here), there'll be another story in the series tomorrow or on Friday. Not making any promises, though. Anyway... enjoy! (even if it's rather sad? I'm sorry :S)

**All That Could Have Been **

  
_“It’s time to let you go_   
_It’s time to say goodbye_   
_There’s no more excuses_   
_No more tears to cry_   
_There’s been so many changes_   
_I was so confused_   
_All along you were the one_   
_All the time I never knew_   
_I want you to be happy_   
_You’re my best friend_   
_But it’s so hard to let you go now_   
_All that could have been.”_   


_  
Amanda Marshall, “I’ll Be Okay”_

  
Once in Afghanistan, there was a boy. Once in Afghanistan, there was a boy who could have been Tuareg in his swathes of clothes and his face veiled save for his eyes, if it hadn’t been for the distinctive American accent in his Arabic when you met him for the first time. Once in Afghanistan, there was a boy who became your best friend, your confidant, your lover.

Once in Afghanistan, you married that boy because he asked you one particularly boozy evening in a German bar at Camp Marmal where no one knew the two of you and you’d just been back from an off the records HUMINT stint in the desert.

It had been a bad week and you’d realized that you didn’t want chance encounters and booty calls anymore. You wanted no one but him waiting for you at the airfield in Bagram and just inside the gates of Bastion and on any godforsaken FOB they sent you to. You wanted to come back to your barracks at Losano and find him lying on your bed, one of your battered paperbacks in his hand, telling you that your taste in books _really_ sucked. You wanted all of it so bad that you said yes and didn’t even mind when an entire company of German Airborne soldiers set out to search for the next best military chaplain and dragged an unsuspecting Navy padre back into the shed where they housed their bar half an hour later.

It was the most unprofessional thing you ever did and even with the hangover they next day, you thought it would be the one thing you’d never regret.

You were so, so _wrong_. You and John both.

At first you thought it was the amount of paperwork – officers marrying enlisted men still isn’t really one of the Army’s most favorite things – that would make you regret the decision but he kept dropping by Losano to help you sort through the masses of dead trees with the same diligence and patience that he would display when he was hunting the bad guys up in the mountains. Officially, you weren’t supposed to know about what he did for a living but you weren’t in military intelligence for nothing.

Then you thought it was the secrecy of what you were both doing, the classified missions and the hush-hush nature of your jobs but even before you got married, you never needed to talk about your jobs to find a common ground. Often enough you didn’t have to talk about anything at all.

It wasn’t the ranks, either or the distance between your bases or the wounds that too many close calls and near misses and full hits left behind, visible and invisible. All of that didn’t bother either of you because you were young and in love and thought nothing could touch you and nothing could, as long as you were surrounded by danger, death and destruction, as long as you had each other. You thought it was enough.

It never occurred to you that _war_ wasn’t your problem.

And now you’re sitting here, pen in your hand, poised over the dotted line right next to the post-it arrow that says “sign here” that your lawyer put there, as if she wanted to make _absolutely_ sure there would be nothing standing in the way of just another military marriage dissolved after less than a year. “It’s just routine,” she told you. “Happens every day,” she told you. “Hundreds of marriages are probably dissolved today,” she told you.

And all you wanted to was scream back at her that what you and John have – _had_ – was never routine, never average, never “one among a hundred”, always “one in a million” but you guessed that she probably hears that several times a week and you’re so tired of reminding yourself that you’re doing the right thing, anyway.

So you nodded and asked her to send you the papers and almost lost them twice in between moving out of the apartment you shared with John, before you both realized that you couldn’t go on pretending that there was no difference between living in a country at war and living in Fayetteville, Georgia, leaving the Army and starting your training at A.R.G.U.S.

You’d like to think it was on accident but that’s not who you are. You never lose important documents. You copy them, file them and make sure that you always know where they are. And you never delay signing anything, either. You adhere to deadlines and return everything posthaste, in better condition than the one you received it in. You still haven’t put your name on the dotted line two weeks after you received the manila envelope with your lawyer’s address.

It’s stupid, your hesitation, the little tremor in your hand, the unnecessarily long staring at that line, you _know_ that. What’s done is done and it’s not like you’re leaving him in the dead of night, with all of his money and no forwarding address left behind. No, you both agreed that you just couldn’t cut it as a couple, that peace was hacking away at your love with a ferocity that war never even began to master, that you needed to put a stop to it if you wanted anything to be left of each of you after peace was finished with you. Right before he told you that he’d be going back to Afghanistan in two months, you both decided to put a very sensible end to maybe the only insensible thing you both ever did in your entire lives.

You spent the rest of the night convincing yourself that you weren’t crying next to him, that it was just something in your bedroom that you developed an allergy to. Needless to say, it didn’t work and needless to say that the struggle between wanting him so bad to ask you what was wrong and being glad he didn’t nearly tore out your heart.

He’d been gone the next day, telling you he needed to step up training for his next deployment, that it was better for him to move into the unmarried NCO quarters, to strengthen team cohesion and probably also to be able to push himself beyond exhaustion without you knocking some sense back into his thick head and you nodded like you’d understood, and you _had_. You’d wanted to knock some sense into his thick head, anyway.

And you still haven’t signed and it’s starting to become ridiculous. You’re kind of glad that he isn’t here to see you fail so pathetically at the simple task of putting your name on a piece of paper and maybe that’s the last incentive you need; John’s soft, sensible, always just a bit deadpan voice in your head, telling you to cut the crap and do what’s best for you and him and you put that pen on paper.

Or maybe you rather stab it into the papers than softly putting it down and you don’t jot down your signature but aggressively scratch it into the stack and maybe those aren’t actual tears in your eyes but you can’t deny that just for a moment, your vision is suspiciously blurred. With more force than necessary, you push the entire mess back into the envelope and seal it.

The same evening, you finally send it away to your lawyer and good riddance.

In the end, it takes the next three months for your anger at yourself, John and the universe to finally dissipate and when a copy of the papers appears in your new mailbox far away from Fort Bragg, in an envelope bearing the cryptic mess of acronyms of an APO address you never heard of before, you thank God that you aren’t far enough in your training at A.R.G.U.S. yet to have access to the information you’d need to find out where he’s currently stationed.

Because if you had, you would. You would find out and you would pack in your training, throw on a uniform and fly out to wherever he’s holed up right now, just to be at war again, to be with _him_ again. And all it takes you to nearly destroy your new career before it even began is a little note on the back of a page he must have ripped out of his ancient paperback copy of _All The King’s Men_ , saying _This isn’t how I wanted it to go. Wish it had ended another way. I’m sorry, Lyla._

It probably was the apology that did you in or John not being as afraid as you to spell your pain – and his – out in black and white and you have never been looking forward to two weeks of intense SERE training as much as right now. Nothing like huddling in the underbrush, freezing your ass off and hoping to God your instructors don’t find you to pull your mind away from the train wreck of your divorce and the gaping black hole of a future in which John has no part, that’s for sure.

But SERE is still two days away and so you hole up yourself in your quarters, telling everyone you do your best studying alone and curl up on your bed and think _This isn’t how I wanted it to, either_ and _I’m so sorry, John_ and you finally let yourself cry for the boy and girl who met in Afghanistan in another life not so long ago and for the love that never was their problem and you swear to God that you will shoot him yourself if he manages to get himself killed wherever he is now. Having to let him go is the one thing you’ll force yourself to, no matter the cost. Never seeing him again is one that you won’t ever be able to force yourself to.

And you’re okay with that, or you will be, in time. Not right now, not tomorrow but you’ll have to be someday because you owe it to John and to yourself and one way or the other, you’ll be okay with it. One way of the other, you’ll survive it and that’s all you can do, anyway. And if there’s one thing you were always good at, it’s surviving. Lucky you. Lucky, fucking you.


End file.
